Metallica’s Kirk Hammett Already Has ‘About Five Hundred Ideas’ for Next Album

In the eight years between the release of Death Magnetic and Metallica's latest album, 2016's Hardwired... To Self-Destruct, guitarist Kirk Hammett recorded hundreds of riffs on his phone... and then he lost the phone. It was a tragic accident that resulted in the axeman not receiving a single writing credit on the new Metallica record and he seems determined not to let it happen again, already boasting "about five hundred" new ideas.

"I went through this whole thing a couple of years ago of losing my iPhone with 500 ideas and I still haven't fully recovered from that," Hammett told British GQ (video below) in an interview ahead of the band's Oct. 24 show at the O2 in London. "And my way of recovering from that is overcompensating… On that phone was 500 ideas, and I have about 500 ideas now at this point, plus. I'm sitting on a lot of really… what I feel is really, really great music that is just waiting to be developed."

The Metallica guitarist has a fevered approach to stockpiling more and more material and he continued, "Every day, I'm just picking up my guitar and I'm thinking about those lost ideas and I'm thinking, 'I've gotta generate more ideas,' in the hopes that maybe one or two of those old 500 ideas that I lost might trickle through… Maybe it'll find its way through, and I'll go, 'Oh, yeah! Eureka!'" Hammett lamented, "It hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened, though."

In July, James Hetfield spoke about Hammett's misplaced phone and its vault of riffs and approached the topic with skepticism, uncertain of why those riffs weren't saved to a secondary device like his computer. Hopefully we won't have to wait another eight years for a new Metallica album and we can finally hear what Hammett and his guitar have to say. Papa Het doesn't want to wait that long, so perhaps we're in luck.

Kirk Hammett Speaks With British GQ

Where Does Kirk Hammett Rank Among the Top 66 Hard Rock + Metal Guitarists of All Time?